STORIES OF ELLEN TERRY

Evening Star, Issue 14512, 2 November 1910, Page 8

STORIES OF ELLEN TERRY

HOW SHE LAUGHED AND CRIED

Ellen Terry tells me, writes Mr Christopher St. John in the ‘ Lady’s World,’ that she has never found any difficulty in being able either to laugh or to weep on the stage. “I have heard of actresses being compelled to resort to vaseline to produce their tears,” she says, ‘‘ but the difficulty with me has always been to restrain them.” “ And what about your laughter. Miss Terry?”—“l can’t remember when 1 could not laugh on the stage without any effort, and it would hardly seem to be worth mentioning if I did not know how difficult some of the mosl distinguished among my comrades have found it to burst into laughter that sounds jolly and merry and spontaneous to the audience. Henry' Irving, for instance, was always- asking me how I did it! The first time that he was ever called upon to laugh outright iu a part was in ‘ Ravenswood.’ There was a scene in which I, as Lucy Ashton, used to burst into peals of laughter, which proved infectious to both Ravenswood and Caleb Balderstone. But neither Mr Irving (as he was then) nor Mr Mackintosh could laugh one Little bit! I shall never forget Mr Irving coming up to me one night triumphantly and saying; “ I’ve found out how it is done. You take a deep breath like this, and then you go up the scale like this,’ and so on, and then he proceeded to make scientific and gloomy sounds which didn't sound in the least like laughing! Oh, how I laughed while ho gave his demonstrations! It tickled me to death, as the Americans say. The ease with which I laugh has been invaluable to me iu comedy pans, but it has not been such a blessing to me when some ludicrous thing has happened on the stage apart from the action of the play, and made me laugh against my will. If such a thing has happened in ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor,* or even in ‘Much Ado About Nothing,’ I have been able to use my hilarity, and if the audience has noticed it, it has not much mattered. But in a serious part in a serious play things arc very different. I have had one or two disastrous fits of laughing.” I reminded Miss Terry that in her recently published autobiography she has put it on record that she was cured of laughing on the stage by Mrs Alfred Wigan, who went into a box and hissed when Mjsb Terry and Mr (now Sir) Charles Wyndham laughed when they were acting together in a piece at the Queen’s. ■‘Certainly Mrs Wigan’s hiss sobered me for a lorn; time, and impressed on me the need of self-control whenever anything funny occurred to upset me in the middle of a scene. But 1 am afraid the cure was not complete. As the years have gone on I have found it easier to minimise the bad effects of giving way to amusement. Often I can have my little joke, and can even talk about it to the actor or actress with whom I am playing a scene without the public being any the wiser or any the worse! But I ought not to laugh all the same,” Miss Terry added, “if only for the sake of example. I have noticed that it tempts others to laugh, too, and because they arc not so experienced or so easy on the stage as I am they cannot ‘ fool ’ with impunity. Nothing is more irritating to an audience than this ‘fooling,’ if they arc sharp enough to detect it.”